Abigail's Party (BBC) [1977] [DVD]: Amazon.co.uk: Alison Steadman, Tim Stern, Janine Duvitski, John Salthouse, Harriet Reynolds, Mike Leigh, Ron Bowman, Margaret Matheson: DVD & Blu-ray Product Description Product Description Beverly wears low-cut dresses, too much make-up and has a reputation as a man-eating monster. In Mike Leigh's modern classic, Abigail's Party, she turns a social get-together between married couples into a virtual time bomb of emotional tension. Alison Steadman won two best actress awards for her portrayal of the bored, bitchy hostess in this savagely funny study of pretentious middle-class social manners. It also stars Tim Stern, Janine Duvitski, John Salthouse and Harriet Reynolds. Running Time: 60 minutes + 6 minutes approx. From Amazon.co.uk Originally screened as part of BBC's Play for Today series in 1977, Abigail's Party is among Mike Leigh's most celebrated pieces, with his then-wife Alison Steadman appallingly brilliant as what Alan Bennett described as the "brutal hostess" at a ghastly suburban soiree.

The Abigail of the title never appears--rather, the dull thud of her lively teenage party forms a distant backdrop (and contrast) to an excruciating evening of chilled red wine, olives and the music of Demis Roussos. Steadman plays the overbearing Beverley, an Amazonian mass of frustrated sensuality in a low-cut party frock. Tim Stern is her small, stressed estate-agent husband. The guests are Janice Duvitski as Angela, a nurse whose quite spectacular gormlessness shields her from the stilted social awkwardness quietly raging around her, John Salthouse as Tony, her taciturn husband and Harriet Reynolds as Sue, the gangly and miserably nervous mother of Abigail. Rather than play for gags, Leigh and his actors mercilessly turn the screw of embarrassment through a series of too-true-to-life exchanges of dialogue, the stuff of all our collective worst memories of encounters with neighbours, aunts and office colleagues. Often misread as a satirical parade of suburban grotesques, Abigail's Party probes deeper than that, touching on nerves of anxiety and repression that throb behind the net curtains of modern England, culminating not in farce but tragedy.

Decades on, Abigail's Party is as psychologically true and close to home as ever--hard to bear but utterly brilliant. On the DVD: Abigail's Party is perfectly reproduced here in all its 1970s garishness. The one extra is a short featurette, focussing on Alison Steadman's playing of Beverley, with comments from the original actors in the TV series and Peter York marvelling at her "paint-scraping" voice. --David Stubbs Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. DVD Â£3.99 Amazon Prime Cast Details | Lake District Theatre | Entertainment in the Lake District | Mike Leigh (Writer) Mike Leigh was born in Salford in 1943. The son of a Jewish doctor, he grew up a middle-class boy in a working-class area. Educated at the local primary school and Salford Grammar School, Leigh went to RADA on a scholarship to train as an actor.

He wasn’t inspired by the profession, so after spending some time as a bit part actor and an Assistant Stage Manager, he enrolled at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, and eventually went on to the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and the London School of Film Technique. Leigh credits the independent film Shadows – which used unknown actors and improvised dialogue – with helping him develop his process of creating a script from improvisation with actors. Between 1965 and 1969 he wrote nine plays in this way. In 1970, Bleak Moments marked Leigh’s debut as a filmmaker. In the intervening years, he concentrated mainly on the small screen and stage. Several of his works were screened as the Play for Today on the BBC, including Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party. Both were hugely successful – Nuts in May was later named ‘Sixth Funniest Film Ever’ by the Comedy Review magazine and Alison Steadman (then Leigh’s wife) won the Evening Standard and Plays and Players Best Actress Award for her portrayal of Beverly in Abigail’s Party. Leigh’s second film was High Hopes, produced in 1988.

He founded Thin Man Films the following year, and has since produced ten more films. They include Naked, Secrets and Lies, Topsy Turvy, Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky and Another Year. Leigh has had huge commercial and critical success: Secrets and Lies won the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival and two BAFTAs; Topsy Turvy won Best Film at the Evening Standard Film Awards; and Vera Drake won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. His films have been nominated for a further 11 Oscars and 12 BAFTAs. His most recent film Mr. Turner starring Timothy Spall, received almost universal critical acclaim. Leigh’s frequent collaborators include Alison Steadman, Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent and Imelda Staunton. Leigh was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. He was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for outstanding contribution to film in February 2015. Mike Leigh: Abigail's Party Abigail's Party To display the menus for the major areas of the site, click on the tickets below. · To read about Ray Carney’s life and work, click on the tickets below.

· Click below to read letters from students and artists, screening news and events, links to other sites, and thoughts about art and life. · For viewing recommendations, click on the ticket below. · The site contains only a fraction of Ray Carney's writing. To learn how to obtain the complete books and essays, click on the ticket below. · The Mailbag Letters and Replies section (click on the ticket higher up in the margin to go there) has answers to many questions, but to contact Ray Carney, click on the ticket below. · Click on the tickets below to access navigation tips, tools, and site tables of contents. This page only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World. To obtain the book from which this discussion is excerpted, click here . Excerpts from a discussion of Abigail's Party Click here for best printing of Abigail's Party text Abigail's Party is a house of mirrors in which reflected images have completely replaced the originals–Beverly, for example, being less a hostess than something much more unsettling: someone playing at being a hostess. In a sense, there is no Beverly.

When we look for her we find only an actress playing a part, a ventriloquist's dummy mouthing someone else's words, an impersonation of a person. She has given up her identity, such as it is, to play a role, which she acts out not only in public but, more disturbingly, even in private. That is the importance of the opening minute or so in which she is alone on camera. We watch her "acting" even when no one else is present. She is not performing for an audience–her husband or her guests, but doing something much spookier: For herself. She is validating herself to herself. In this night of the living dead, there is no Beverly separable from the part she plays. Her identity is completely synthetic–a shaky structure of prefab "attitudes," poses, self-regarding routines, and shop-worn hostess-with-the-mostest affectations. Like some brilliant, performing circus animal, Beverly provides a dazzling "display" of canned phrases, gestures, and tones that simulate states of thinking, feeling, and caring without ever getting within three martinis of the reality.

We can recognize the theatricality of Beverly's performance not only through Alison Steadman's tonal archness in her line delivery, which inserts brackets around each of Beverly's gestures and quotation marks around each of her utterances, but even in the script. There is something artificial, imitated, derivative, or inauthentic about virtually every line of dialogue Beverly utters. It all feels "scripted"–and it is, not by Leigh, of course, but by Beverly. Beverly inhabits a realm–call it hostess-speak–in which verbal expressions bear no relationship to real feelings (or an inverse relationship, as in the case of the syrupy "please" she intermittently coos in Laurence's direction, which is not in the least a polite request but a snarled imperative and threat). Like the Hollywood air kissing Beverly's speech resembles, social interaction in this world becomes a kind of bad acting in which you "indicate" your emotions instead of actually feeling them.

(Real, messy emotion would only get in the way, impeding the smoothness of the performance and embarrassing the audience.) Since each of the participants in the drama knows it is all theater, the fraudulence, the archness, is not concealed but cultivated and proclaimed, as a way of expanding their identities and intensifying their presence. As that way of putting it is meant to suggest, the problem Leigh is examining is much deeper than what is normally connoted by insincerity. Beverly (like all of the other characters in Abigail's Party) is not covering up her real feelings and thoughts. That would be an entirely more conventional dramatic situation. It would suggest that she knows what she is doing. It would imply that she was simply trying to fool people (a fairly simple situation in life and art), when the real problem is that she is fooling herself (a much more interesting state of affairs). Beverly is completely and utterly sincere; she means what she says; she is not being deceitful. Which is the true problem. There is no reality lurking in the depths; everything is fake. Beverly's ideas and emotions are no different from her jewelry: both are equally cheap knock-offs.

Her most private, inner experiences are as performance not only through Alison Steadman's tonal archness in her line delivery,èd as her expressions. Most films, particularly American ones, cultivate what might be called a "surface-depth" understanding of the relation of falsity and truth. Surfaces, appearances, expressions are potentially delusive or misleading; truth lies in the depths. It is hidden somewhere underneath visible expressions. If you cross-examined Laurence and Beverly in private, and dug for the truth, you could get them to confess to their lies. This simply is not the situation Leigh imagines. He holds us on the surface and, in fact, tells us that the surfaces are all there are. There is no realm of "truth" underneath or distinguishable from the realm of "falsehood." There are no secrets to exhume. There are no psychological depths to mine–or at least none that matter–in Abigail's Party . No one is being deceitful. No one is covering up anything. That would simplify understanding. We could dive down and discover the truth as we do in films like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. The situation Leigh imagines–here and in all of his work–is far more complex.

There is no escape from slippery, shifting, multivalent surfaces. There is no realm of unsullied, uninflected reality underneath. Everything is mixed. We must live in the flux.... –Excerpted from Ray Carney, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ray Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh is quite simply the best book of film criticism I have ever read. Now I have to say that I have never read any of Carney's other books (he has also written books on Cassavetes, Frank Capra, and Carl Dreyer), which, for all I know, might be even better. But as a friend of mine put it, 'His writing blows everything else out there away, even to the point of many times seeming like simply in a class of his own...different in kind more than degree.' And although I admit to not having read 'everything else out there,' I feel the exact same way. Ray Carney's new book has undeniably rocked my world.

Ray Carney's book is to what usually passes for film criticism what Mike Leigh's movies are to what, in Hollywood, usually passes for filmmaking: a truly radical critique, a whole different animal, and a solitary voice of sanity that has somehow miraculously managed to make itself heard over the noise and hullabaloo of this culture's present-day insanity. –Caveh Zahedi, creator of A Little Stiff and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, in a review in Filmmaker Magazine To learn how to obtain this book, click here ï¿½ Text Copyright 2003 by Ray Carney. All rights reserved. May not be reprinted without written permission of the author. "Play for Today" Abigail's Party (TV Episode 1977) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A TV play based on the Hampstead Theatre production. Beverly has invited her new neighbours, Angela and Tony, over for drinks.

She has also asked her divorced neighbour, Sue, because Sue's ... See full summary » Director: a list of 50 titles created 01 Mar 2013 a list of 71 titles created 04 Mar 2013 a list of 267 titles created 09 Aug 2013 a list of 32 titles created 27 May 2015 a list of 30 titles created 7 months ago Search for " Abigail's Party " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Title: Abigail's Party (01 Nov 1977) 8.2/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Edit Storyline A TV play based on the Hampstead Theatre production. Beverly has invited her new neighbours, Angela and Tony, over for drinks. She has also asked her divorced neighbour, Sue, because Sue's fifteen year-old daughter, Abigail, was holding a party in their house. Beverly's husband, Lawrence comes home late from work, just before the guests arrive.

The gathering starts off in a stiff insensitive British middle class way with people who do not know each other, until Beverly and Lawrence start sniping at each other. Written by Will Gilbert 1 November 1977 (UK) See more » Company Credits Did You Know? Trivia Alison Steadman was heavily pregnant with her and Mike Leigh 's son while playing this role, but the flowing evening dress disguises the bump. See more » Quotes Angela : I got very drunk on champagne at our wedding, do you remember? [Tony remembers it all too clearly] Tony : [with feeling] Yeah. one of the great Plays for Today that has grown from TV 8 November 2007 | by didi-5 (United Kingdom) – See all my reviews It seems superfluous to say anything about 'Abigail's Party', as it made such an impact when first shown on 'Play for Today', and continues to do so. Mike Leigh moved on to devise and direct many feature films, always in collaboration with his actors. Then-wife Alison Steadman was a frequent collaborator, but this was the role which made her name.

As Beverly she is truly horrendous, the typical embodiment of middle-class suburbia, with kitchen gadgets she doesn't know how to use and dubious taste in music (Demis Roussos, Tom Jones ...). Abigail of course is never seen, but her party is heard as a background to Beverly and Laurence's soirée while worried mum Sue sits awkwardly with her constant top ups of gin and tonic. Neighbours Angela and Tony are an echo of the couple visiting George and Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?' The genius of 'Abigail's Party' is its sharp dialogue, its acid wit, and the power it has to amuse us, make us cringe, and ultimately shock us. Unmissable and unforgettable. Alison Steadman ... Beverly Abigail's Party: The party that has lasted for 30 years | Media | The Guardian The Observer The party that has lasted for 30 years Thirty years after it caused a TV sensation, social comedy Abigail's Party has a power to stir devoted fans and stern critics. Alison Steadman still holds a soft spot for Beverly, but Leigh himself can hardly bear to watch ...

Sunday 14 October 2007 06.42 EDT First published on Sunday 14 October 2007 06.42 EDT Share on Messenger Close It's not often that Mike Leigh gets to feel like Mick Jagger. He is not the most rock'n'roll of film-makers, but for one night in 1999 he felt like a pop star. As part of the National Theatre's year-long project charting 20th century drama, the original cast of Abigail's Party read extracts from the play in London's Olivier Theatre. It was the first time they had been reunited on stage since the play made its debut at Hampstead Theatre in 1977. Public response was phenomenal. 'It felt like a Stones concert,' says Leigh. The box office was mobbed and the overflow audience watched the action on a TV screen outside the auditorium.

Leigh knew the play was popular - it was a sell-out for two runs at Hampstead, received well as a BBC Play for Today in the same year and, when repeated for a second time in August 1979, around 16 million people watched - but nothing could have prepared him for that night on the South Bank. Perhaps he shouldn't have been so surprised. In the 30 years since Abigail's Party was first shown on television, the drama has taken on a life of its own. It is a simple story brilliantly done: Beverly and her husband Laurence host a drinks party for a few neighbours in their suburban house. The guests - Angela, her husband Tony, and Sue, a divorcee whose daughter Abigail is having a rowdy party nearby - are subjected to Beverly's desire to be an exemplary hostess. Swishing around in her voluminous dress, she plies them with alcohol and nibbles. After a series of awkward silences and arguments about music and art, Laurence, tense from the outset, dies of a heart attack.

Beverly, the personification of the gauche, aspirational hostess, has become a gay icon and a drag-queen favourite; there are Abigail's Party parties where fans recite lines to one another (Beverly: 'Tone? A little cheesy-pineapple one?') People are endlessly drawn, it seems, to finding inappropriate moments funny: it's even hard to stifle a horrified laugh when Beverly flicks ash over Laurence as he lays dying. The play is continually being staged around the world, whether by professional or amateur actors. Alison Steadman gave a sublime, almost untouchable performance as Beverly but others have got close - notably Elizabeth Berrington in the 2002 West End revival and Jennifer Jason Leigh in an Off-Broadway production in 2005. Right now the play is running in Sao Paulo. Some have tried daft experiments: Hornchurch Rep had real drinks instead of pretend alcohol in one rehearsal and didn't make it to the second act. Recently, Tony Grounds wrote The Dinner Party for BBC1; starring, among others, Steadman and Berrington, it drew inevitable comparisons to Abigail's Party. Leigh would rather not discuss it.

Pale imitations aside, it is still hard to think of another play that offers such a relentlessly uncomfortable and yet hilarious take on strained relationships and awkward social situations - on what Leigh calls 'the done thing'. It is a deep, dark, moving and beautifully-observed period piece. Three decades on, this comedy of bad manners is hard to beat. Richard Eyre, the film and theatre director who is a contemporary of Leigh's, says it has reached classic status. 'Abigail's Party has become adjectival. You can describe an event as being "Abigail's Party". Which, of course, means that Mike's work has acquired the status of a playwright such as Pinter.' Eyre remembers seeing Abigail's Party at Hampstead. 'It was one of the funniest and most terrifying things I'd ever seen. I thought then what I think now: a great piece of work. I didn't think it would be remembered in 30 years time - more that it was an astonishing genre that Mike had invented: social horror.' Yet, as a stage production, Abigail's Party almost didn't happen, and as a BBC Play for Today it was a last-minute affair.

By 1977, 34-year-old Leigh had already made several films for the BBC's prestigious Play for Today slot, including Hard Labour and Nuts in May but had only done 'one proper, fully fledged, two-act stage play': Babies Grow Old was staged at The Other Place in Stratford before transferring to the ICA in London. The reviews were good and, after years of being overlooked by the Hampstead Theatre, Leigh was finally invited to lunch with David Aukin and Michael Rudman, who were respectively general manager and artistic director. Leigh was preoccupied with preparing the next Play for Today with producer Margaret Matheson, but agreed to meet. 'Lunch is always a good sign. Aukin and Rudman took me to a Chinese restaurant in Belsize Park and said they had enough money for a 10-week rehearsal and half a dozen actors. I had to say yes or no before leaving the restaurant. I was reluctant but finally agreed.' He went home and said to Alison Steadman, whom he had married in 1973, that he was doing this play purely as a 'stopgap'.

He added: 'Whatever it turns out to be, it will sink without trace because the important thing is to make another film for the BBC.' But Abigail's Party was such a success at Hampstead that half a dozen West End managers wanted to put it on. However, Steadman discovered she was pregnant, and the West End was not an option. At the same time, Matheson told Leigh she had an empty television studio on her hands and suggested recording Abigail's Party. Leigh thought it wouldn't translate on to television but was persuaded otherwise. Three decades later, it remains one of his best-known works - despite the fact that Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake were all Oscar nominated, and the latter is also his most commercially successful film in the UK to date. Despite its phenomenal success, Leigh has an issue with the technical side of Abigail's Party. We talked about the play while working on a book together, and I was surprised at his very first comment: 'For a film-maker, it's a work of deep embarrassment and pain.' He is referring not to the Hampstead version, however, but 'the stage play that was wheeled into a television studio'. Talking again, he is slightly less damning.

'The cast had done 104 performances, and so they steamed into the studio and we did it with a confidence that television plays didn't normally have. But for all the commitment of those taking part, it is appallingly and inconsistently lit. And at one point you actually see the boom in the shot. It's as amateur as that.' Leigh usually enjoys seeing his films time and time again: Abigail's Party is an exception. 'I feel uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with anyone's intentions or commitments; the crew were enthralled by it and didn't pull the plugs at the agreed time of 10pm but continued till almost midnight. It has everything to do with a cumbersome medium that died a very natural dinosaur death: the five-camera television studio drama. Having said all that, the flaws are overshadowed by the remarkable enthusiasm whenever it's aired.' So where did Beverly, who Alan Bennett once described as 'a brutal hostess with shoulders like a lifeguard and a walk to match', come from? Alison Steadman discloses that she had two different sources. When she left her native Liverpool for East 15 Acting School in Essex, Steadman was struck by the local women.

'One of the girls in my class lived in Romford, so we went to a few pubs round there. Very flash cars parked outside, all these rich Essex guys looking at the well turned-out women who had clearly dressed up to click with them. They were lower middle-class women looking for money.' She also remembers one particular woman from Liverpool. 'I grew up on a nice private lower middle-class estate in Anfield in the Fifties and early Sixties. There was this one very glamorous woman in her early thirties who lived nearby with her mother - the sort of woman everyone would whisper about: "I think she's going out with the doctor, don't know if he's married..." She had flame-red hair with a rinse on. Not tarty, very attractive. I was fascinated by her. Eventually Mike asked what sort of work I thought this woman might do and I immediately thought: beauty therapist.' Steadman spoke to personnel managers at cosmetic companies and spent a few days wandering around Selfridges, watching beauty therapists at work.

She saw one pulling a reluctant woman - no make-up, a bit drab and damp from the wet weather - out of the crowd and doing a makeover on her as she sat on a stool, embarrassed but unable to leave. Later Steadman was improvising with Janine Duvitski. Beverly was giving Duvitski's character Angela advice about lipstick, and the Selfridges experience was in the back of her mind when she said: 'Now, can you take a little bit of criticism?' She then encouraged Angela to sit in front of the mirror and repeat to herself: 'I've got very beautiful lips.' It has since become a famous scene; Duvitski tells me that just the other day a make-up artist quoted the line back at her. 'My god, Abigail's Party was 30 years ago! But I find it very flattering. People still remember it more than any other work I've done.' Abigail's Party is not without its critics. Leigh remembers seeing Kenneth Williams at one performance, 'dressed in black and with a face as long as a fiddle'. Leigh watched him leave at the interval. 'He thought it was awful.

He saw it as sneering and braying at suburban people.' Dennis Potter was equally furious after watching it on television. He wrote in the Sunday Times that the play was 'based on nothing more edifying than rancid disdain, for it was a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes... It sank under its own immense condescension.' Leigh is still affronted. 'The play is so in love with the characters... Abigail's Party is not a play about them, it's a play about us. Which is why it works for the audience.' If it still works for a contemporary audience, Abigail's Party has also left a lasting impression upon its cast. Steadman has spent the last 30 years working hard not to repeat the aspirational hostess in her subsequent roles. Yet she occasionally feels nostalgic for that period. 'When we were rehearsing, I brought some music in from home that I thought might be appropriate. One was Sam "The Man" Taylor's "Blue Mist", which I loved. It ended up being the smoochy music that Beverly plays to seduce Tony.

I put it on last night, and took me straight back to the Hampstead Theatre in 1977. It's a bit painful to listen to. Almost like returning to a house you once lived in that has got lots of memories but is empty now.' She smiles. 'Having said that, we laughed so much when we were putting the play together. Being Beverly was just terrific fun.' The players Alison Steadman Beverly Although she says Beverly is one of her saddest characters, Steadman has only good memories of the TV play. 'We were in the studio for four days and on the final night the head cameraman came over to me, shook my hand and said it had been an absolute pleasure. Such a gesture was unheard of. There was a real sense that we were doing something a bit different, a bit unusual.' Steadman had already made her name with Leigh's earlier Play for Today, Nuts in May, but it is Abigail's Party that she still finds herself talking about. 'Many of the comedians around now say they watched it when they were very young; it was a real stepping stone.' Where is she now? She has continued to work with Leigh since they separated in 1995.

Other roles include Mrs Marlow in The Singing Detective and Pam in Gavin & Stacey. Tim Stern Laurence As he had already worked with Leigh on The Five Minute Films for the BBC and Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Royal Court, Stern was surprised to hear his agent's response when he was offered a part in Abigail's Party. 'She lived in Swiss Cottage and advised me not to do it; she said that people who went to Hampstead Theatre didn't like what she defined as "experimental plays". I ignored her and agreed to take part. But I had no idea how much it was going to catch on...' Where is he now? Stern has appeared in Heartbeat, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries and Holby City. Janine Duvitski Angela When the cast was improvising early on, Duvitski remembers feeling anxious. 'I didn't know if my character would be good enough. I couldn't quite believe that the stuff we were doing would ever get on stage - until John Salthouse and I, in character as Tony and Angela, met Alison Steadman as Beverly for the first time. We had been improvising alone as a couple for weeks and finally we went to the drinks party.

I couldn't stop laughing. It was amazing.' Duvitski hasn't watched Abigail's Party for years, apart from the odd clip. 'People often quote lines at me, and it usually takes me time to work out what they're talking about.' Where is she now? Duvitski worked with Leigh on Grown-Ups in 1980. She appeared in One Foot in the Grave and The Worst Week of My Life; she is now filming the ITV comedy Benidorm. John Salthouse Tony Tony is memorable for not saying much, but Salthouse is the opposite. 'By the time we opened, I was exhausted: Tony had so much anger inside him and I had no way of releasing it. So the process was tough but absolutely worth it. It marked me for life. It had a profound effect on me.' Where is he now? After a spell on The Bill as DI Galloway, Salthouse, who played football for Crystal Palace until serious injury ended his career, appeared on Sky's Dream Team as manager Frank Patcham. He is now working on projects with Shameless creator Paul Abbott.

Harriet Reynolds Sue Thelma Whiteley played Sue in the original production of Abigail's Party at Hampstead. But when the play returned to the theatre for a summer run, she declined to take part. Leigh's initial reaction was to ditch the play, but he decided to recast. 'Sue is uniquely reactive rather than proactive, which meant I could recreate the character with another actress and then slot her into the play. When we put Harriet Reynolds in an improvised situation with the others, she came out with nearly the same lines.' In 1992, Reynolds died of cancer. In 1999, when the cast was reunited at the National Theatre, Whiteley agreed to play Sue again. She died in 2000. · BBC4 is hosting a night dedicated to Abigail's Party on 28 October. Amy Raphael is editor of Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh (Faber), to be published next spring. Anyone for Demis Roussos? Changing cultural times Then Mike Leigh: Nuts in May Nuts in May To display the menus for the major areas of the site, click on the tickets below. · To read about Ray Carney’s life and work, click on the tickets below.

· Click below to read letters from students and artists, screening news and events, links to other sites, and thoughts about art and life. · For viewing recommendations, click on the ticket below. · The site contains only a fraction of Ray Carney's writing. To learn how to obtain the complete books and essays, click on the ticket below. · The Mailbag Letters and Replies section (click on the ticket higher up in the margin to go there) has answers to many questions, but to contact Ray Carney, click on the ticket below. · Click on the tickets below to access navigation tips, tools, and site tables of contents. This page only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the WORLD. To obtain the book from which this discussion is excerpted, click here . Excerpts from a discussion of Nuts In May Click here for best printing of this page Leigh is not interested in mocking someone else, but showing us things about ourselves. As he has often insisted, there is no "them" in his work. Everywhere we look, we are meant to see ourselves. His hell is never reserved for other people. That is what makes his films so unsettling.

We are supposed to take them personally. If we don't, we're not really paying attention. Keith and Candice-Marie's dietary and behavioral eccentricities are symptoms of a state of imaginative derangement that, in Leigh's view, runs throughout society. They have become cut off from their own experience by culturally-received ideas and emotions. For this relisher of sensory, physical, and behavioral particularities, there could be no greater heresy than basing your identity and emotions on abstractions. To do so is to lose touch with reality and, in effect, make yourself unreal. Characters like Keith and Candice-Marie have gone insane in a far more insidious and dangerous way than any of Hitchcock's or John Carpenter's protagonists. The ultimate fictions that enthrall Keith and Candice-Marie are not ideas about the world but about themselves. Their intellectual relationship to nature is evidence of an even more disturbing intellectual relationship to their own lives and experiences (a subject which Leigh will explore further in Abigail's Party and Who's Who). In their resistance to processed food, Keith and Candice-Marie have unconsciously swallowed all manner of processed thinking, canned feeling, and shrink-wrapped selfhood.

Their identities are as received, their emotions as dictated by fashion, and their "views" (in both the perceptual and intellectual senses) as second-hand as the opinions in the travel-guides they slavishly follow. In their quest for culturally-certified "naturalness," they have become completely artificial. Leigh wants us to see that if there is even a shade of "naturalness" in his movie, it resides in figures like Honkey and Finger, not Keith and Candice-Marie or the well-trod paths they hike. In this orgy of intellectual recycling and imaginative role-playing, there is nothing real left. All of Leigh's work explores problems of selfhood and identity, and the major problem with taking your feelings and opinions from outside of yourself, in Leigh's view, is that you lose track of who you really are. Keith thinks he is a paragon of reasonableness, when he is actually an imaginative terrorist. Candice-Marie thinks she is a flower-child devotee of peace and love, even as she unceasingly nags and bullies Keith about not being loving enough.

The way we can detect the falseness of Keith and Candice-Marie's conception of themselves is not only through the contradiction between what they say and do, and in the ironic discrepancy between what they say they see and what Leigh shows us (as on the pig farm), but through the unimaginativeness, inflexibility, and unresponsiveness of their performances. In Leigh's view, when you play a part that is emotionally and intellectually inauthentic, the result will always be a mechanical performance. A false role can never be truly spontaneous, free, or responsive. In the implicit dramatic metaphor that informs most of Leigh's work, Keith is a bad actor or director who mechanically adheres to a pre-established script and is terrified of any departure from it. That is the significance of his reliance on texts of various sorts for virtually everything he says and does (instructions on putting up his tent, notebooks, maps, tour itineraries and schedules, a numbered guidebook, and the campground regulations he quotes).

Keith is unable to go "off-book," to creatively improvise on the margins of a text or allow the least bit of creative independence or departure from the "script." Keith tyrannizes over everyone around him, insisting on adherence to (and punishing departures from) his pre-determined "scripts" for experience. That is the point of a climactic scene late in the film, when Keith and Candice-Marie invite Ray to their campsite to have tea. Keith functions as a bad director who attempts to dictate the most minute details of Ray's and Candice-Marie's blocking (where they should stand for the photograph), line readings (in the song), and feelings about and interpretation of their roles (in the talk about nutrition). For a filmmaker so clearly committed to the value of expressive individuality and spontaneity, the result of attempting to pre-script and over-direct human interaction is not only expressive boredom but the erasure of fundamental individual differences. While Leigh's cinematic style is an effort to respect individual structures of feeling and points of view, Keith's personal style denies the existence of any point of view other than his own.

He cuts everyone and every interaction to fit the Procrustean bed of his own interests, stage-managing all conversations and directing all interactions to conform to his own interests. He is a kind of bad artist who makes life too purposeful, too meaningful, too orderly–and in doing so takes the spontaneity, surprise, and fun out of experience. He takes the play out of play.... –Excerpted from Ray Carney, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ray Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh is quite simply the best book of film criticism I have ever read. Now I have to say that I have never read any of Carney's other books (he has also written books on Cassavetes, Frank Capra, and Carl Dreyer), which, for all I know, might be even better. But as a friend of mine put it, 'His writing blows everything else out there away, even to the point of many times seeming like simply in a class of his own...different in kind more than degree.' And although I admit to not having read 'everything else out there,' I feel the exact same way.

Ray Carney's new book has undeniably rocked my world. Ray Carney's book is to what usually passes for film criticism what Mike Leigh's movies are to what, in Hollywood, usually passes for filmmaking: a truly radical critique, a whole different animal, and a solitary voice of sanity that has somehow miraculously managed to make itself heard over the noise and hullabaloo of this culture's present-day insanity. –Caveh Zahedi, creator of A Little Stiff and I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore, in a review in Filmmaker Magazine Mike Leigh’s work is difficult to pin down. Echoing what Ray Carney says of Leigh’s more blinkered characters, examining these films becomes a lot murkier when you bring too many ideas and film-critical categories to bear. Although not without its strengths and serendipities, Garry Watson’s book suffers from intellectual larding while, like one of Leigh’s more far-sighted characters, Carney and Quart’s gets in amongst the rough-and-tumble.... The Carney and Quart book was the first critical study of Leigh’s work and every subsequent book on Leigh must negotiate its rigor and insight.

I have yet to read a book that better approximates my experience of watching Leigh’s films.My one regret is that, apart from the important BBC plays Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party (1977), I have yet to see many of the early works wherein Carney locates the wellspring of Leigh’s improvisatory power and vision. Animating this study is a distinction between two types of Leigh characters that resonates culturally, politically and spiritually across his work. For Carney, there are those like Rupert and Laetitia Boothe-Braine in High Hopes (1988), Nicola in Life Is Sweet (1990), and Sebastian in Naked (1993) who, mired in a mental image of themselves, pigeon-hole others in prejudices, effectively foreclosing on generous and responsive solidarity. Then there are those like Cyril and Shirley in High Hopes, Wendy in Life Is Sweet, and Louise in Naked who have all the foibles, strengths, and self-doubts of their humanity, and are open to the flows of human interaction. Alison Steadman’s giggly and affectionate Wendy still epitomizes the principle of social cohesion in Leigh.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Steadman and Leigh were married, while the positive response to the density of experience recalls the thick descriptive methodology through which a Leigh film is arrived at. Evoking the Dickensian and Lawrentian views of human sensibility (as Watson points out), Leigh feels that the individual mindset has consequences for the wider culture, and by this light the generous impulse in Wendy and other Leigh characters has been eroded by consumerism and social mobility in postwar Britain. Not as overtly political as Ken Loach, Leigh has nevertheless chronicled the domestic consequences of the decline of the social consensus imagined by writers from Dickens to George Orwell. One of the most unexpected aspects of Carney and Quart’s book is the way it puts mainstream American cinema in perspective by comparing it with Leigh’s cinema.With his focus on characters as mannered and tic-ridden “outsides” (as opposed to Hollywood’s granting us access to Forrest Gump’s inner kindness despite the goofy exterior), Leigh charts that elusive quality, the “ordinary” moment—the everyday drama of interaction they never show in Hollywood because it occurs between the heroics. In doing so, Carney shows, Leigh pulls apart the Enlightenment model of agency and volition on which most American movies depend.

Recalling classes he has taught—he is Director of Film Studies at Boston University—Carney describes how Americans are often perplexed by a cinema in which nothing seems to happen. But Leigh’s drama of transformation is rooted in the layered rehearsal of interpersonal dynamics observed with the patience of a European Ozu. Whilst British Leigh commentators have been preoccupied with the writer-director’s purchase on the sociological landscape, Carney convinces us that Leigh and Ozu share a feeling for the interplay of performance and mise-en-scène which moves beyond David Bordwell’s pioneering Ozu dichotomy between modernism and tradition. Leigh’s conception of experience (unlike that of Hollywood) is durational rather than deadlined, heterogeneous rather than hurried. Carney’s examination of space and time in Leigh reveals, as Bordwell has done elsewhere, that the mainstream model of experience conceals as much as it reveals.... –Richard Armstrong, a review of Gary Watson, The Cinema of Mike Leigh and Ray Carney and Leonard Quart, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, published in Film Quarterly, Dec 2005, Vol. 59, No. 2, pp.

62-63 No other study sheds such a revealing light on Leigh's background, his influences, his emotional groundings, and, of course, his unique cinematic sensibility....[Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh is a] powerful and multifaceted analysis which welcomes, like Leigh's work, the vibrant eye and the uncalcified consciousness. -- Andrew Hamlin, in a review of Ray Carney's The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, published in MovieMaker Magazine. To learn how to obtain this book, click here ï¿½ Text Copyright 2003 by Ray Carney. All rights reserved. May not be reprinted without written permission of the author. Mike Leigh Z Mike Leigh Mike Leigh is an award-winning screen-writer and playwright who was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1943. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and at Camberwell and Central Art Schools and the London Film School. He gained acting and directing experience with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his first original play, Bleak Moments, evolved from improvisations.

His career began as a playwright and theatre director, his stage plays including Smelling A Rat (1989), It's A Great Big Shame, Greek Tragedy, Goose-Pimples (1982), Ecstasy (1989) and Abigail's Party (1979), the latter being revived on its 25th anniversary and nominated for the 2002 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Revival. Later he began to make films for television, then became involved with feature film production. His television plays, which he wrote and directed, include Nuts in May, Home Sweet Home, and Vera Drake. He is well-known for his films which do not begin with a script, but evolve from actors talking, improvising and creating characters. His multi-award winning films include All or Nothing (2002), Life is Sweet , Secrets and Lies (1997) and Topsy Turvy (1999).

Samuel French Titles by Mike Leigh BFI Screenonline: Mike Leigh on TV Mike Leigh on TV The small screen work of a great director In the light of Mike Leigh 's later status as an internationally successful filmmaker, it is surprising to reflect that, after his first feature Bleak Moments (1971), he did not get the chance to make another film for the cinema for 17 years. Fortunately, he was able to hone his skills by working in television during that time, in common with other directors such as Ken Loach and Stephen Frears. Leigh's TV features include several classics of the medium, and show him developing many of the preoccupations and techniques that would characterise his later films. In two of the earliest, he returned to his native north-west England: 'Hard Labour' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 12/3/1973) is a character study of a middle-aged Salford housewife, and 'The Kiss of Death' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 11/1/1977) shows the faltering attempts at romance of a young undertaker's apprentice in Oldham.

Mostly, however, the TV films, like the later work, focus on the suburban south. Leigh 's ability to create chillingly convincing middle-class monsters emerged in 'Nuts in May' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 13/1/1976), with the self-righteous couple Keith and Candice-Marie Pratt, and again in 'Abigail's Party' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 1/11/1977), a straightforward studio-based adaptation of Leigh 's theatre play of the same year, in which the overbearing hostess Beverly presides tyrannically over an ill-fated cocktail party. 'Abigail's Party' was strenuously attacked in a review by Dennis Potter after its first transmission. He accused Leigh of sneering at lower-middle-class tastes and lifestyles although, viewed objectively, the play looks more like a lamentation of the spiritual poverty of received values. Leigh does not suggest that there is anything inherently wrong with social aspirations, only with losing sight of what one is aspiring to, and why.

He certainly seems to have slightly more sympathy for the domestically trapped Beverly than for 'Nuts in May' 's Keith, who is a pompous, domineering control freak. Eventually, during the course of a camping holiday in Dorset, the control freak loses control of himself during a violent argument, and the effect is devastating, reducing Keith to tears and making him suddenly seem rather pathetic and vulnerable. Like Beverly and her fellow party-goers, he is a fully rounded and thoroughly credible character - which is precisely what makes him, and them, so appalling. Two-dimensional caricatures would be much easier to ignore, and to forget. This ability to understand, and even care about, characters at the same time as satirising them was less in evidence in Who's Who (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 5/2/1979), set in and around a firm of London stockbrokers. Perhaps it is Leigh 's lack of sympathy for the protagonists that makes this ultimately a rather episodic work that never quite coalesces. It nevertheless offered a memorable addition to Leigh 's gallery of comic creations in Alan Dixon, a Pooterish middle-aged clerk who has an obsession with the activities of the British royalty and aristocracy.

Leigh 's skilful orchestration of character and narrative was confidently reasserted in 'Grown-Ups' (Playhouse, BBC, tx. 28/11/1980). The story of a young couple living in Canterbury and their family, friends and neighbours, the film builds with perfect logic towards a painfully funny set piece in which five of the six principal characters are piled in an undignified scramble on a staircase. Perhaps for the first time in Leigh 's work, but certainly not the last, we are confronted with a sequence of escalating comic chaos that leaves us unsure whether to laugh or to cry. 'Home Sweet Home' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 16/3/1982) was more melancholy in tone, but equally well constructed. Revolving around the activities of three postmen and their families, the film is a study of failed communication and loneliness, and demonstrates Leigh 's growing ability to deal with big themes and emotions through a depiction of ordinary lives that is honest enough to be both funny and sad.

The social conscience that has underpinned much of Leigh 's best work came to the fore in Meantime , making it the only one of Leigh 's TV features not to be produced by the BBC . It explores the growing bond between two brothers in their early twenties, who live with their parents in a tower block in London's East End, and provides something close to a definitive portrayal of a large section of Britain four years into Margaret Thatcher 's premiership, capturing the high unemployment and disaffection of the period, especially among the young urban population. Four Days in July also approached a specific social and political situation from a familial perspective. A series of conversation pieces set in the Falls Road area of Belfast, the film leads up to the near-simultaneous birth of two babies. One of the mothers is a Catholic, the other the wife of a soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment. A recurring theme of Leigh 's work - of when to have children, how to bring them up, or whether to have them at all - is explored with particular poignancy against this troubled background. Leigh has also made some shorter TV pieces.

In 1975 he wrote and directed five films lasting five minutes each, which were intended to be the first in an ongoing series. However, the BBC chose not to continue the project, and those that were made were never broadcast until a 1982 season of Leigh 's work. The 30-minute plays The Permissive Society (tx. 21/11/1976) were both studio productions for BBC Birmingham , the second of which was subsequently wiped. Leigh finally returned to the cinema thanks to a change in Channel Four policy, whereby work produced under the broadcaster's Film on Four banner would be made on 35mm so as to make possible a cinema release prior to TV transmission. By that time Leigh had created a formidable body of TV work, which had frequently attracted extremely impressive viewing figures. Grown-Ups was watched by 4.5 million, 'Nuts in May' by 8.5 million, and the third broadcast of 'Abigail's Party' - during an ITV strike - by a phenomenal 16 million. His reputation in Britain had been firmly established, and his style of narrative and characterisation was embedded in the national consciousness. Tony Whitehead

Question: Who wrote the plays “Nuts in May” and “Abigail’s Party”?
Answer: Mike Leigh